Langes Messer

Origins

Large single-edged knives and short swords had been used in northern Europe since the early Middle Ages, and the Falchion was well established by the thirteenth century. The Messer developed from the everyday knife that almost every man in the German-speaking lands carried. During the fourteenth century these knives grew into full-sized weapons, and by the fifteenth century the Langes Messer, the long knife, was common throughout the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia, Austria and Hungary. Because it was built like a knife rather than a sword, it has often been suggested that it escaped laws that restricted who could carry a sword. Historians still debate how far this was true, but it was certainly carried widely by burghers and peasants as well as by soldiers.

Design & Construction

The blade was single-edged, usually straight or gently curved, and often widened slightly or ended in a clipped point, with a false edge on the back near the tip. What set the Messer apart from other swords was its hilt. Instead of a narrow tang passing through a round grip, it had a flat, broad tang, and the grip was made of two slabs of wood or horn riveted on either side, as on a kitchen knife. The pommel was often bent or capped to one side. The straight crossguard usually carried a Nagel, a small nail or lug projecting at right angles from the side of the cross, which protected the fingers and knuckles of the sword hand. Blades varied a great deal in length. A typical long Messer had a blade of roughly 70 to 90 cm, and the largest two-handed versions, called Kriegsmesser, war knives, were larger still.

Combat Use

The Messer was a practical weapon for cutting, and it was used both in war and in civilian fighting. In Bohemia a similar weapon, the tesák, was a common arm of Hussite infantry, and blades of this kind were likely among the side arms of the defenders at the Battle of Vítkov Hill in 1420, though the sources describe the fighting only in general terms. The Messer also had its own school of fencing. In 1478 the priest Johannes Lecküchner wrote a long illustrated manual on the Kunst des Messerfechtens, the art of fighting with the Messer, which survives in manuscripts in Heidelberg and Munich. Lecküchner built on the tradition of the fourteenth-century master Johannes Liechtenauer, adapting its longsword techniques to the one-handed Messer. It taught cuts, parries, grappling and disarms, and it shows that the Messer was taken as seriously as the Longsword by German fencing masters. Other sixteenth-century fencing books included Messer and its training form, the Dusack.

In the early sixteenth century some Landsknechts carried a Kriegsmesser as their main weapon or side arm, alongside the short Katzbalger and the Landsknecht Zweihänder.

Legacy

The Messer declined during the sixteenth century, as the sword with a more complex hilt and a narrower thrusting blade became fashionable, and as firearms changed the soldier's equipment. The wooden or leather Dusack continued to be used for training and competitions in German fencing guilds for some time afterward. Today the Langes Messer is studied and practiced again by historical European martial arts groups, who work from Lecküchner's manual and other surviving texts.